Some famous names have played the central father-son roles in John Mortimer’s A Voyage Round My Father: Alec Guinness and Jeremy Brett in the 1971 West End premiere, Laurence Olivier and Alan Bates in the 1982 film adaptation and Derek Jacobi and Dominic Rowan in the 2006 Donmar Warehouse production.
Now Rupert Everett takes on the part of the father, with Jack Bardoe playing the son, in this revival from Jonathan Church Theatre Productions and Theatre Royal Bath Productions. Directed by Richard Eyre and designed by Bob Crowley, the production opened in Bath in early October, ahead of a tour.
Mortimer’s autobiographical play focuses on the difficult relationship between a lawyer who becomes blind, and his son who, just as Mortimer did, flirts with a career in theatre before following his father into the legal profession.
How well has Mortimer’s autobiographical play aged in the 50 years since its original opening? Can Everett fill the sizeable shoes of Jacobi, Olivier and Guinness? Does Eyre’s production captivate the critics?
Fergus Morgan rounds up the reviews...
Mortimer’s play opens in the 1930s, when the nameless father loses his sight in a gardening accident, and spans the following 30 years through the memories of his nameless son, from boarding school to the bar. How does its story of father-son strife strike the reviewers?
They mostly find it outdated. It is a “memory play and coming-of-age story in one”, describes Arifa Akbar (Guardian, ★★★), but it feels “far removed from our times”. Clive Davis (Times, ★★★) agrees. For him it is “almost Dickensian” and a “museum piece”.
It makes for “a very old-fashioned evening”, concurs Kris Hallett (WhatsOnStage, ★★). “It’s created for an audience who wants to bask in the bucolic mid-20th-century vibes of respectable middle England. The question about why this play, why now, is never answered.”
Mortimer, who died in 2009, “currently languishes in those awkward fallow years that often follow a writer’s death, before a vibrant rediscovery by a new generation,” writes Fiona Mountford (Telegraph, ★★★). And this revival “will not, I fear, hasten this process”.
Eyre has staged countless hits over his 50-year career, including some during his tenure as artistic director of the National Theatre from 1987 and 1997. He has won five Olivier awards, plus a BAFTA for his 1988 television drama Tumbledown. He was a friend of Mortimer, delivering a eulogy at his funeral in 2009. Does his direction impress the press?
Not particularly. His staging is “stubbornly flat and lifeless” for Mountford and has a “stolid” and “faintly musty air” for Davis. Both Akbar and Holly O’Mahony (The Stage, ★★★) wonder whether Eyre’s familiarity with the real people that inspired the play’s characters is part of the problem. “There is a sense of the director’s own fondness for the family thawing their frosty relationships,” writes O’Mahony. “It’s a smoothing of relations that brings peace to the story, while reducing its bite.”
Bob Crowley – a regular collaborator with Eyre – has had a similarly impressive five-decade career as a designer, winning three Olivier awards and seven Tony awards. Here, his set transports the audience into a country garden, and it is thoroughly praised by the critics.
“Crowley’s set is a pleasure to look upon, evoking the beloved garden where the father found solace in his dark world,” describes Gary Naylor (TheArtsDesk, ★★★). It is an “evocative bucolic backdrop”, agrees Davis, while Akbar admires its “arboreal splendour”.
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Everett, now 64, had his breakthrough in the early 1980s, appearing opposite Kenneth Branagh in the West End production of Another Country in 1981, and in the subsequent film adaptation in 1984. He has been a regular on stage and screen ever since. Here, he steps into the shoes of acclaimed actors Guinness, Olivier and Jacobi. Can he fill them?
Some critics think so. He is “effortlessly charismatic” and “the best thing” about the show for Naylor, while Mountford enjoys his “barbed zinger witticisms” and “irate campaigns against the earwigs in his garden”. O’Mahony finds his “blustering and volatile” performance “memorable”.
Others are not so sure. He definitely “dominates the night”, writes Hallett, but Everett’s performance is little more than “a range of old-man tics” in which “the acting is never far from the surface”.
Elsewhere, there is praise for Bardoe’s performance as the son – he is “winningly self-effacing” for Davis and “has a lot of fun” for Naylor – and for Julian Wadham, who multiroles as a range of supporting characters, bringing “amusing awkwardness” to the role of a headteacher in particular, according to Akbar.
Everett’s performance is predominantly praised, as is Crowley’s set, but Mortimer’s autobiographical plays feels old-fashioned and Eyre’s staging seems stuffy and stale.
Three-star reviews in The Stage, the telegraph, the Times, theArtsDesk and the Guardian, plus a two-star review in WhatsOnStage suggest A Voyage Round My Father may not be a trip worth taking.
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